Do you have the spring cleaning fever like I do? We just got our carpets cleaned and it’s heaven on earth! But we aren’t talking about cleaning your house, let’s take it up a notch on the importance scale and talk about spring cleaning your budget!
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Hey Pearl! 2019 is here and it’s a GREAT time to sit down and really get your goals set for this year. We could set all kinds of personal goals, but I am here today to help you set your money goals for 2019.
Let’s reflect on 2018 first, shall we? What were your financial wins and loses last year? Is there something that you are doing particularly well, and areas that could use improvement?
Write them down! Now, let’s dive into the 6 best tips I have for setting financial goals for 2019!
Make sure you also follow me on Instagram where I often share stories talking about creating a budget, like these. 🙂
Related Articles:
–5 Money Questions for Debt Free Living
–When You Suffer from Budget Burnout
6 Steps to Financial Goal Setting
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What do you value?
What is valuable to you in your life right now? It may be spending time with friends, getting outdoors, working out, cooking meals? Once you know what you value, you’ll be better equipped to set your financial goals to help facilitate those values in your life.
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Brainstorm Your Dreams
I want you to list out ALL of your dreams, whether they are fiancial or not. Once you know what dreams you have for your future, you can create financial goals that lead you in the right direction! Make a list of 5 dreams you have for the next year, 5 dreams for 5 years from now, and 5 dreams for 10+ years.
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Prioritize Those Dreams
Now that you have a big “brain dump” of your dreams, let’s narrow it down. Prioritize and get down to the 3 most important dreams for the next 1, 5 and 10 years. Pick 3 dreams for each time period. From here, we are going to start to make a list of actionable steps to take for each dream you have. Where do your goals and values align? Make sure every goal you choose reflects what you value most.
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Top 3 Life Goals
Now we are going to dive in even deeper. Let’s narrow it down to your top 3 goals for your whole life. Don’t focus on anything else but three at a time. I know this is a hard step, but its so important to help drive you towards making financial choices that help you get to your dreams the fastest.
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Get specific
For each of these 3 top goals write down:
- What the goal is
- Why it’s a priority and why it makes the cut and deserves your attention
- Write down any potential obstacles that might stand in your way
- What financial baby steps will help you achieve your goal. Write them down.
- Give it an ideal due date
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Reevaluate Regularly
Now that we have these goals, and steps to reach them, you’re going to reevaluate every 6 months to see where you’re at with achieving them. You’ll be able to readjust at this time. For example, lets say your top goals were getting better at meal planning, saving for a vacation and spending more time outside, but then you had a baby. Now you may shift to saving for college for that child in the future. Our priorities change from time to time so make sure you’re adjusting as you go.
Setting big, lofty goals can be really challenging. I expect this to take you some time to work through. But having these goals laid out is going to give you an excellent starting place for building a goal based budget. Another thing that will help is taking one of my FREE webinars coming up this week and next!
There are a few things that will be huge game changers when it comes to sticking to your budget once and for all! The very most important is to start using a cash envelope system!
You remember that stuff right? Cash. It’s that stuff you used to use as currency in exchange for goods or services.
Using cash instead of swiping your debit or credit card every time you step into a store is statistically proven to help you spend less money! I’m guessing that might be a problem for ya.
But you don’t want to just go pull a random amount of cash out of your bank account and head straight to the store with no plan. That could result in financial disaster for you!
What would your monthly grocery budget look like if you spent it all in one day? That is exactly what I do for our family every single month and I want to teach you how to do the same thing! It’s all part of living the Pearl Life!
Why would you want to do that? Well I guess you wouldn’t be interested in learning this life changing mom strategy if you don’t want to save thousands of dollars each year…
Oh you do!? I kinda thought you might be interested to see what our monthly grocery budget strategy looks like. How about I share some real life numbers with ya?
When it comes to getting started on a budget that you will actually stick with, there are a few budget basics that need to be established. It’s super simple and you can probably get this done in just a few minutes! I’ll show ya how!
Our family has had to learn the hard way with getting our personal finances on track, but that doesn’t mean you have to!
Learn from our mistakes and our wins and skip the hard part! I am sharing our real numbers today in hopes of painting a clearer picture to help you as you are getting started on a budget.
What you need to do is put yourself in the same shoes and ask yourself the same questions. These budget tips for beginners will help you set the basic groundwork for creating a hugely successful family budget that will not fail!
The bills keep on coming! Unless you are an extreme minimalist who lives off your own land and built your own self-sufficient solar energy system, you are pretty much guaranteed every single month to have to pay up.
And even if you are such a minimalist, you are still going to have to pay land taxes.
Though, that type of self-sustaining life does sound a bit nice. Doesn’t it?
My point is, for the majority of us, we have to pay the bills! This mandatory task can become extremely stressful when you are living paycheck-to-paycheck.
I have a fun idea for us to hang out!
What do you think about once a week, we get together, eat something super tasty, pretend like we don’t care how many calories we are devouring, and all the while we have some heavy (in a fun way!) girl talk going on!?
The chitchat will all be centered on a few chapters taken from the current book that we are obsessing over.
Doesn’t that sound super fun! I’m a lot excited about it! What a great way for us to better get to know each other?
Our first book is THE PERFECT read for someone who needs a heavy dose of shopaholic’s anonymous! It’s for someone whose desire to spend is borderline addiction.
So far in this Pretty Penny Budget Series we have talked about the tools you need to get started, how to set them up, and how to use them efficiently. Now we are ready to dive even further into starting a budget by comparing your income to your expenses and to actually setting a budget a long with financial goals.
